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Malware Installed by LiveJournal Ad
Jamesday writes "LiveJournal recently introduced an ad-supported level. Over the last few days an advertiser used an ad to install the ErrorSafe malware that tried to trick people into believing they had a fault on the computer that needs them to purchase a fix. The ad used a server-side setting and targetted only those outside the US, to prevent LiveJournal's own checks from noticing it. LiveJournal has apologized for the ad and slow response." Even our readers have had to endure more than one browser-crashing ad campaign from time to time. Thanks for sticking around.
This just in: Capitalism and Morals do not necessarily go hand in hand.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Newspapers clear ads before printing. Radio stations clear ads before airing them, and so do tv stations. Why should websites be any different?
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
I use an ad-supported LJ account, and the mentioned advertisement was made in flash. I had to deal with it a couple of days ago. Hoo-ray for security holes. Can't we just sue the ad company for unauthorized usage of our computer's resources?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Slashdot has ads? :)
I, for one, do not welcome our new malware-installing overlords!
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
... but they and the advertisers are the ones driving people to them.
No seriously, is it any wonder people turn to ad-blockers? Try reading an informative bit of text when there's a Flash advertisement of box jumping around and flashing like a student at Mardi Gras. I don't care if you are trying to tell me I'm your millionth visitor. You misspelled congratulations! The box makes me wish I had no peripheral vision! FOAD.
Now I know publishers want to make a buck (I have a few websites [sans-advertising] myself), but if the advertisers are going to use annoying/underhand methods, people will take steps to protect themselves. A lot of these companies would do well to look at the sort of program Google offers: inoffensive, targeted, text ads.
In short: make your advertising better -- advertisers AND publishers -- or lose that which you supposedly value. Eyeballs.
If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar
I once played this web based role playing game a while ago. It was just a so-so game, but one exceptional thing I did notice was that while playing from a Mac I would get randomly named .exe files downloaded to my desktop. Turns out that ads on this game site were just full of malware. Visiting from a Windows computer, I was getting prompted to install crap. So I went to report it on their forums and find out what was being done about it. They didn't care! The site maintainers claimed there was nothing they could do about it. It was their ad provider's fault. All they could say was "you should be running malware protections.." Needless to say, I was outraged by this irresponsibility. I told them off and never visited their god forsaken site again.
How can you NOT take responsibility for malware spread through your own site? I understand that people contract out ads, but geez, come on. No need to draw from the bottom of the barrel.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Do people still get them? I thought everyone had adblock installed.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?
The way to discourage this kind of nonsense is to make sure that the advertisers are identified and given a large public black eye. Probably that's not appropriate if the ad just uncovered a bug in the Flash player, but I think it certainly is in the case where an ad installs spyware.
Did the advertiser know this was going to be done? Quite possibly not, but they are still the ones responsible for the ad: they want the good consequences (more sales), so they have to take the bad ones as well. If their bottom line is hurt, they'll start paying more attention to what their ad agencies and other agents are doing. (This is just an application of Murphy's Golden Rule: the guy who has the gold makes the rules.)
While it was good of them to pull the ad from the rotation immediately, they failed in several other ways:
(1) they failed to post a notice or provide links for the removal of the malware. At best in the blog there are references that such removal instructions exist, peppered with a warning that some of them are actually malware themselves. They should have made the fix EASY and FOOLPROOF to obtain after getting their readers infected. It's been how long since they got their subscribers infected and they have done nothing more than to stop more of them from getting infected. They helped to break the computers, they should play an active roll in fixing them.
(2) the impression I got from their posts in their blog was that "oops sorry not our fault, not our advertiser's fault, it's one of the ad companies that subscribed to our advertiser". This is a cop-out. When you provide a service like they do, your advertisement is a bundle that comes with your service, and as such you are responsible for its content. I don't care if it's a 3rd party. You take on the responsibility for the content you deliver, regardless of how you get it. You can have legal arrangements with your content providers that provide YOU with a legal remedy, but the grief passes through you. You get sued, and then you sue the ones upsteam that caused you to get sued. You do not "pass the buck" and point a finger up the chain three levels and say not my problem good luck getting anything out of them, because the consumer has no legal recourse against those people. You as the content provider do have a legal recourse against your advertiser, and they have recourse against their affiliate who caused the problem in the first place. This pass the buck mentality is cheap and lazy, and they should be ashamed for trying to pull it.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Seriously, people should be making use of the adblocking functionality in their browsers, or better yet, installing filtering proxies like proxo to halt this crap before it gets to the browser.
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
My simple fix for the security problems associated with Flash is to not install flash. Let's face it, 99.9% of flash is just obnoxious ads anyway. Who needs it.
It's for this reason that any webmaster who insists on using 100% flash to view their site deserves a swift kick to the nutsack.
Google Videos, for one, are all Flash.
Use Firefox and install Flashblock, then you'll have the benefits of both worlds.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
But I kept getting problems with my computer while reading the ad filled apology page.
Apparently, I needed to download some software because my computer was out of date. Thank goodness I visited LiveJournal today, which told me to update with their new UrP0wnd.exe update.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
"This just in: Capitalism and Morals do not necessarily go hand in hand."
Caveat Emptor
Doesn't matter if its politics, economics, religion, software, hardware, or even information.
The fact that there are people running businesses with questionable ethics in no way reflects on the morality of the underlying economic philosophy. History easily shows that people who have questionable morals have no difficulty working within the structure of any social philosophy which gains any significant following whether it be economic, religious, or governmental in nature.
So when someone comes around selling their alternative economic philosophy based on the idea that the current system inherently lacks morality, caveat emptor.
burnin
Here is one. But because it is based upon Christ's teachings, it would be more of a Theocracy with "communism" as it's economic model.
http://www.hutterites.org/
As for being "moral", as long as they do follow their religious code, they are "moral" by definition.
Now, whether the code they follow would be considered "moral" by someone following a different code, well, that's because "morality" is subjective, not objective.
My simple fix for the security problems associated with Flash is to not install flash. Let's face it, 99.9% of flash is just obnoxious ads anyway
Even better, just disconnect your computer from the internet. Who needs internet? Let's face it, 99.9% of internet is just obnoxious anyway.
You know, Google ads are the only ads I look at any more. (Hell, I run them on my own site!) They are short, not ugly (because Google cares about the viewer's experience), and quite often very pertinent to the content. I have to try really hard not to puke when I log in to something like Yahoo! Mail! and I see flashing banner ads for "Get your Credit Rating" or "Cheap Mortgages" or "Warning: Your system is broadcasting an IP address! Ph33rz0r teh RFC!". They are the most useless ads ever. The only reason I think they might survive is if the ad networks charge per impression, not per click--because almost nobody would click on them!
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
As a (hypothetical) site visitor, how does simply visiting the site bind me to their terms? Also, if the malware-laden advertiser hits my machine at my first visit, before I have a chance to evaluate the TOS, there's NO way the TOS can be held to protect them.
Moreover, if the malware violates unauthorized-access statutes, the TOS would be well and truly trumped by such legislation.
Overall, they're in a very weak legal position; a reasonable person would conclude that the best course of action is to mitigate the damage to users, FAST and well, rather than take a ho-hum-not-our-fault attitude. Their response speaks volumes about them...
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
I think a better way to deal with flash is to use the FlashBlocker plugin for Firefox
All flash-based ads get replaced with a placeholder and a little play button, then you get to selectively enable the ones which you require - http://flashblock.mozdev.org/
I'm only here for the blowjobs. I bet our experiences are similarly disatisfying.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Companies like this make the Internet a frightening, dangerous place. They literally attempted to crack into people's computers without their consent.
Why don't we sue them into the ground as pursuing cyberterrorism as a business model?
|/usr/games/fortune
"Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work to the benefit of us all."
Somebody set up us the bomb.
-- Gxis! Ed.
According to TFA, it doesn't use an exploit except the one located between the chair and keyboard. It's a little vague, but a non-admin account in XP would have not allowed "ErrorSafe" to install.
Blame the user, not the software.
Even better, just disconnect your computer from life. Who needs life? Let's face it, 99.9% of life is just obnoxious anyway.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Simple. Websites need to stop being lazy and host ads on their own servers. Yes, there would beed to be a way for the advertisers to track hits, but there should be a way to do that while keeping the potentially dangerous content off the advertisers site.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
What the parent was trying to say, and what was disregarded so lightly by yourself, is that attitudes like selfishness are possibly, indeed even likely, culturally relative. I would argue even that they are not just culturally but individually relative. Though I do not disagree that there may be an urge to satisfy ones own needs (a toddler will wine when it is hungry etc.), there is also an urge for altruism. Psychologists have found that toddlers will try to help others if they know that the person is having trouble. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/discoveries/2 006-03-02-toddler-altruism_x.htm This would indicate competing values, and it is up to the experience of the individual, (largely determined by the culture they grow up in,) and perhaps their genetic makeup to determine which of these values is nurtured to become dominant.
Unfortunately, LiveJournal is one of the better ones out there. I've had an account there for three years now, and when I joined, LiveJournal still had the "by invite only" policy. They dropped that policy sometime afterward, then recently implemented the Sponsored+ account option. Although it does mean putting up with ads when reading straight from other people's weblogs, I still have the option not to have them on my own, which means I don't have to put up with them when reading other people's entries from my friends page. Even when I do read from others' pages, the ads aren't generally all that bad, especially compared to the eye-sores that many sites have.